When comparing Monkey X vs Blacksmith 2D, the Slant community recommends Monkey X for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Monkey X is ranked 19th while Blacksmith 2D is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Monkey X is:

You can create custom targets

Pro

Low cost license fee

Pro

Native module support

You are not restricted only to the modules you get from the official release. You can build your own stuff. Even build your own "app" module. It feels limitless. In comparison with other cross platform solutions, you actually get the translated source code and you can play with it if you want.

Pro

Easy to learn

With it's Object orientation and clean syntax its a brilliant language to learn if you have never done any programming before and yet still has all the power it needs to make full games and apps.

Pro

Uses a great, easy to learn language

Monkey X uses a custom programming language (called Monkey) for all its scripting needs. Monkey is rather easy to learn, it's object-oriented which will help most programmers with understanding it. It's also statically typed and uses a garbage collector, helping to avoid manual memory management.

Pro

Partly open-source

The entirety of the base-language itself is open source. Commercial modules such as Mojo for non-free platforms cost a one-time fee. Though Mojo is not free for all targets, the targets for these platforms are, meaning it is possible to implement other frameworks for these targets.

The Desktop (GLFW and C++ based) and HTML5 implementations of Mojo are currently free and open source.

The language's development is completely public, and is managed via GitHub.

Pro

Free HTML5 and Desktop (GLFW) target platform

The free version of Monkey X lets you compile to HTML5 or Desktop (GLFW). Other platforms such as iOS, Android (and OUYA), XNA, Flash and Windows 8 (Phone) require the paid version of Monkey X Pro.

Pro

Cross-platform

Monkey X is a cross-platform game engine. It allows developers to run the same code on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Flash, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

The development environment supports Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Pro

Not running in its own VM

Unlike other multi-platform engines (Unity3D, Corona, etc), Monkey-X games do not run explicitly in their own virtual machines. Your code is translated into the native languages of each target platform, and then compiled as a native executable. However, just as native games, on platforms such as Android (Currently), and HTML5, games will be ran through the targeted platform's usual VM(s). That being said, you won't be dealing with a proprietary virtual machine, so you won't experience any real overhead when compared to a native game.

Pro

Made by the Mark Sibly Factor

The Mark Sibly Factor denotes that a programming language will be easy to learn, fun to learn and allow any age group ( within Cognitive Reason ) to program games and great games. The Mark Sibly Factor denotes also that the games programming language you purchase will be backed by decades of compiler programming experience, game making tool programming and finally a Game Programming Language that kicks Ass.

Pro

Free for commercial releases

With the free version of Monkey you are still able to create commercial HTML5 and Desktop games.

Pro

Helpful community

Helpful community for beginners is available both in english and russian.

Pro

Drawing Commands

Drawing commands are easier to read and edit than is manipulating scene graphs. You can immediately see in your code what's going to be drawn and in what order. Transformations are a no-brainer too.

Pro

Lots of great examples

Monkey X includes over 50 examples ranging from complete sample games to demos of single features.

Pro

Object oriented programming

MonkeyX is an object-oriented dialect of BASIC that's easy, clean and powerful.

Pro

Cache as bitmap

Automatically detects changes and updates bitmap cache. Allows to gain even more performance on heavy scenes and runs smoothly on old devices.

Pro

Most valuable when size matters

All engine code is written in ES6, fully GCC typed, allowing to eliminate all dead code from your app.

Pro

Advanced scene graph and rendering pipeline

Dirty flag tracks scene changes and avoids unnecessary calculations and context calls. If no changes were made to the scene since last frame, no rendering will be done. Battery efficient.

Pro

Good performance

According to the tests on the Github page, the performance is better than in Phaser!

Pro

Good and clear source code

The source code is well commented and easy to understand.

Pro

Super small build size

Super small build size through dead code elimination. The best for playable ads and Facebook Instant Games.

Ad

Cons

Con

The documentation is not very thorough

The documentation contains a reasonably detailed language overview, and a somewhat-generated list of the included modules, classes, and methods. Module descriptions are rather lax, but usually present. Method descriptions tend to be short, and a majority of them contain no usage snippets; most parameters have very minimal descriptions. And there are no community collaboration features to help improve it, besides GitHub.

Con

The included IDE is poor

Although better IDE'S are availabe for a price, the default one is bare bones and lacks functionality

Con

No real asset store

Untangling how to keep assets in the ".data" requires attention and a filenaming convention.

Con

You'll have to learn a new programming language

Even though Monkey is rather easy to learn and borrows a lot of concepts from more popular languages, having to learn a new language develop games is a lot of friction for people that already know how to program in other languages..

Con

limited OS export targets with free version

Free version only targets Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and HTML5, not mobile.

Con

Small community

The project is young, so the community is extremely small.

Alternative Products

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.